The Made-up Story of a Tacoma Mayor

The basics are true. Mayor Weisbach did lead a group of angry Tacomans to expel the city's Chinese population in 1885, and he had employed heavy-haned tactics to break a longshoreman's strike. For those two things, I decided it worth committing character

 

There should be no wondering why there is no street in Tacoma, Washington named after Mayor Robert Weisbach. There’s a street named after Hosmer, one named after Fawcett, and a square named after Tollefson. But Weisbach? Nothing. And for good reason. Mayor Robert Weisbach was a very naughty man.

He was born not in Washington some time in the late 1830s and in trying to escape angry creditors wherever it was he came from finally found himself in Tacoma in the late 1870s. He happily found that the Cascade Mountain Range acted as sort of an anti-creditor shield that could protect him, freeing him up to run up all kinds of new debts. 

             In short order, he started up one of the forerunners of the Tacoma News Tribune called The Tacoma Weekly Brothel-Keeper and Lumberjack. His newspaper was little more than a scandal sheet that he used to try and smear everyone in the city he disliked. The paper was too coarse to be of much use in the restroom, and not fit for reading (but it was still better than today’s New York Post). Many people considered either killing him or sending him packing from the city, but since his paper was the only one in town, they would have had to go without their favorite comic strip, Little Cretin Fannie.

             In the late 1870s, the Northern Pacific Railroad announced that Tacoma was to be the location of their West Coast terminus. Weisbach promptly began to invest his money in importing Chinese laborers, who were forced to work under brutal conditions, in order to help build the railroad. He invested the remainder of his money in brothels, and paid to have girls sent to Tacoma. Weisbach, like many men who never worked a day in their lives, always labored under the impression that working class people were just as immoral as he was.

             By 1880, Weisbach had built an empire on the backs of hapless Chinese laborers and working girls. He was perhaps the most powerful man in the city and could act with relative impunity, but he saw the city’s budget was off limits to him. 

             Oh, but to get his greedy hands on that budget! How easy it would be to enrich himself! He thought of how nice it would be to be mayor. The mayor was at the time also the chief of police, so not only could he openly engage in corruption, he could ensure that he wouldn’t be arrested for it. He could also have his enemies thrown in prison! By 1884 he was ready, and ran for mayor.

             The campaign of 1884 was a bitter one. Weisbach used his newspaper, the only one in town, to smear his opponent, the honorable E.S. Smith. Smith was a decent man and appeared to have the backing of most of the city. But unfortunately for Smith, he had something else Weisbach didn’t have: a sense of ethics. Weisbach’s lack of any ethics freed him to buy votes and to pay groups of ruffians to stuff the ballot boxes for him. When Election Day came on May 5^th, Weisbach had won by 39 votes. It was the most shameful, one-sided, corrupt election in the city’s history. Rumor has it that Weisbach celebrated with a great deal of champagne in one of the brothels he owned and on that night only, he made sure every opium den in the city was well-stocked with free opium.

             His reign over the city was nothing but a nightmare of scandal, corruption, and graft. He stole from the city, he stole from those doing business in the city, and he even stole candy from the city’s children (Tacoma’s children are still aware of the Great Halloween Candy Swindle of 1884). But two events during his administration stand out as being particularly terrible.

             The first was his brutal attempt to break the Longshoreman’s Strike of 1884. Weisbach, not understanding that working people down on the docks wanted at least enough money so they could eat AND heat their homes, sided with the ship’s owners. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise, considering they were lining his pockets just so he could protect them. The Mayor promptly began using the police to harass and intimidate the striking men. Unfortunately for the Mayor, the police weren’t up to the job. It seems that he had purged the police of their more honest elements and stocked the department with his lackeys, all of whom were too frightened of the burly longshoremen to confront them. The ship’s owners were furious and demanded action, but all Weisbach could think to do was send out a strongly-worded proclamation demanding the longshoreman give up the strike (the striking men laughed in response). Finally, the ship’s owners had enough and settled with the strikers, a move that humiliated the Mayor. The city was delighted at their Mayor’s embarrassment and began openly taunting him in the streets. The Mayor of Seattle, who despised Weisbach, began sending him taunting prank telegrams. 

             Things eventually settled down to their normal routine of vice and corruption. But 1885 saw Weisbach facing an even greater problem. On the streets of Tacoma that year, he had mistaken a young woman for one of his brothel employees and treated her as such. The young woman turned out to be the daughter of Tacoma’s most beloved pastor. 

             The city now wanted his head. People began talking of forming a mob to get rid of him once and for all. Weisbach knew he needed to come up with something in order to save his bacon. He looked around for a scapegoat and quickly found one: the city’s Chinese population.

             Weisbach had helped bring the Chinese to Tacoma in the first place. He was landlord to many of them and made sure they were cheated and kept in abject poverty. He held few qualms about abusing them and felt free to physically strike them when he felt like it. He forced young Chinese girls into his brothels and printed racist caricatures of them in his newspaper.

             They had helped make him rich and now he needed them to take the fall for him. There were no other racial, ethnic, or religious minorities in the city he could single out. He knew the people didn’t understand and therefore didn’t like the Chinese, and he knew he could use that. 

             And use it he did. He quickly stepped up the attacks on them, printing lurid, imaginary tales of white women being lured into their opium dens (they actually had no opium dens) so that they could be sold into slavery. Those were followed up with invented stories of Chinese-on-white violence. 

             Soon enough, the city’s population was aroused by these false tales. On November 3^rd, 1885, he led a group of prominent citizens down to where the Chinese lived. They ordered them from their homes and had them placed on trains (which rode over tracks the Chinese had helped to build) and sent them to Portland, Oregon. The property the Chinese people left behind naturally fell into the hands of who else? Mayor Weisbach. 

             That got him off the hook for accosting the pastor’s daughter but it certainly didn’t change his image as a corrupt baboon’s rear end and in 1886 he was decisively defeated by someone corrupt enough to stuff the ballot box, but not as obnoxiously corrupt as Weisbach. 

             Weisbach stayed in Tacoma for a few years until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. He decided to go there to make his fortune, not from gold, but by importing girls and cheating the gold miners. He set out on the SS Hood Canal on August 4^th, 1897 but never made it to the Klondike. It seems that on board the ship there was a poker game and Weisbach had won handily. There were some acrimony and accusations flew that Weisbach had cheated, and some time that night, Weisbach disappeared from his stateroom, never to be heard from again. It is assumed he was murdered and his body thrown overboard.

             When Tacomans heard of this, there was great rejoicing in the city and a city-wide three-day holiday declared.